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Featured in Development

Alex Bradbury gives an overview of the status and development of RISC-V as it relates to modern operating systems, highlighting major research strands, controversies, and opportunities to get involved.

Featured in Architecture & Design

Will Jones talks about how Habito, the leading digital mortgage broker, benefited from using Haskell, some of the wins and trade-offs that have brought it to where it is today and where it's going next. He also talks about why functional programming is beneficial for large projects, and how it helps especially with migrating the data store.

Featured in AI, ML & Data Engineering

Katharine Jarmul discusses research related to fair-and-private ML algorithms and privacy-preserving models, showing that caring about privacy can help ensure a better model overall and support ethics.

Featured in Culture & Methods

This personal experience report shows that political in-house games and bad corporate culture are not only annoying and a waste of time, but also harm a lot of initiatives for improvement. Whenever we become aware of the blame game, we should address it! DevOps wants to deliver high quality. The willingness to make things better - products, processes, collaboration, and more - is vital.

Featured in DevOps

Service mesh architectures enable a control and observability loop. At the moment, service mesh implementations vary in regard to API and technology, and this shows no signs of slowing down. Building on top of volatile APIs can be hazardous. Here we suggest to use a simplified, workflow-friendly API to shield organization platform code from specific service-mesh implementation details.

WSO2 App Factory: A DevOps Platform Running in the Cloud

WSO2 has announcedApp Factory, a PaaS-enabled DevOps platform for the enterprise providing a set of integrating tools for creating, managing and governing applications along with the necessary runtimes to run those applications in the cloud.

The WSO2 App Factory runtime contains the tools necessary throughout the development lifecycle of applications, such as:

Code repos: Apache Subversion, Git

CI: Jenkins, Maven, Bamboo

Issue/Project management: JIRA, Redmine

Testing: Clover, FindBugs, JUnit

According to WSO2, App Factory can be integrated with “any SDLC [Software Development Lifecycle] toolset” and with “existing user repositories via LDAP or Microsoft Active Directory.”

Developers work locally with the IDE of their choice, but committing code to an App Factory repository or externally triggers the continuous delivery process, according to Chris Haddad, WSO2 VP of Technology Evangelism. Haddad told InfoQ that WSO2 intends to integrate the development environment in App Factory by providing a browser-based IDE in the future, so the entire toolchain will run in the cloud.

Applications developed with App Factory can be deployed to an app store making them available to the entire organization. The components of this DevOps platform are depicted in the following picture:

Besides project overview and configuration, the App Factory portal enables setting up several resources: database (currently MySQL), data stores accessed via JDBC, and APIs, the later being integrated with WSO2 API Manager. WSO2 intends to add support for Cassandra, MongoDB and CouchDB in the future, but organizations can add their own data store through the cartridge architecture WSO2 Stratos employs.

The portal also can be used to enforce corporate and government compliance, as Haddad explained to us:

When moving a project through stages (e.g. development, testing, and production), gate checklists are presented to validate compliance with corporate and government policies. Organizations may customize the gate checklists, and integrate automated test frameworks that ensure code compliance with corporate and government policies. Because project approval, promotion, and deployment are integrated in a single DevOps environment, teams are assured that the project complies with policies before being deployed into production.

As with other WSO2 products, App Factory is open sourced under Apache License 2.0.